Seeking uses for vacant Far Rockaway land

From Brownstoner Queens:

Permanent development is in the works for a vacant, 80-acre site on the Rockaway Peninsula, an area badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, but in the meantime the organization 596 Acres is looking toward interim uses for the land. A few weeks ago, the group led a discussion on potential interim uses for these empty lots in the Arverne East/Edgemere neighborhood — all those green dots in the map above are public vacant space. Proposals for the lots include a food fest, a view tower for star gazing, a farmers market, and a ski trail. See the details of each proposal here.

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City can't find anyone to build LIC library

From LIC Post:

Construction of the Hunters Point Library is likely to be delayed yet again following the city’s inability to find a developer willing to build it for the $28 million that was budgeted.

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, speaking at the Hunters Point Civic Association meeting last night, said the city has had to modify the design plans to keep the construction cost below $28 million. He didn’t say what those design changes would be, other than saying they would merely be “cosmetic.”

Well, it does seem that a facelift is exactly what this building needs.

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DeBlasio would be Bloomberg 2.0

From the Wall Street Journal:

Bill de Blasio has risen to the top of the polls assailing the Bloomberg administration, but if elected he could pursue even more aggressive policies than his predecessor on a crucial issue: creating densely packed new residential towers through land-use decisions.

Mr. de Blasio, the city's public advocate, would push for mandatory affordable housing and fewer tax breaks for developers. But he wouldn't differ from Mr. Bloomberg on a fundamental premise that building significant amounts of new housing is a top way to spur economic growth and control housing costs.

Mr. de Blasio's pro-development policies have helped allay fears in the real-estate industry that perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the race would, as mayor, be a fearsome opponent on big developments.

For some, however, Mr. de Blasio's support for new high-rise towers—even with more affordable housing—is dissonant with his campaign's theme of easing income inequality. As a City Council member in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio was a strong supporter of the three major Bloomberg-backed development projects, including the project known as Atlantic Yards, which critics say has hastened gentrification and helped deepen the economic divide in that area.

Some liberal community groups said they feel betrayed. "The whole thing is a joke to us that people are looking at this guy as if he cares about the community," said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a group that pushed to get the Gowanus Canal designated a Superfund site—a goal Mr. de Blasio unsuccessfully opposed. "I don't find any step of the way that he's actually been on our side here."

Mr. de Blasio has met with developers, and his campaign has received some $460,000 in contributions from real-estate interests, including developers, brokers, architects and construction firms, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

From New York Magazine:

Democratic mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio has styled himself as a scourge of slumlords and a critic of the Bloomberg administration’s policies to shelter the homeless, assailing the “failure of the strategy” in his first policy statement as public advocate. But at a time when he was considered a long-shot candidate, De Blasio found financial support from an unlikely source: one of his most frequent targets, a former Bloomberg administration official who now runs a network of homeless shelters leased from some of the city’s most notorious landlords.

During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to De Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards. (See the full list at the bottom.) Most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels and slum apartment buildings that operate as shelters under the aegis of Housing Solutions USA, run by Robert Hess, formerly Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of homeless services. Though Hess’s organization is a nonprofit, the landlords he works with have reaped millions in public funds by turning their rundown properties into shelters, collecting sky-high rents from the city.

Hess has contributed just $400 to De Blasio, the maximum that campaign-finance law allows for contractors doing business with the city, but in May 2012 he held an intimate fund-raiser for the candidate at his Long Island City apartment. Among the handful of attendees were two hotel landlords who gave generously to De Blasio's campaign, including Alan Lapes, one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.

Hess declined to comment on the event when reached by phone yesterday. “That’s a personal matter,” he said. But other attendees described an informal living-room dialogue about De Blasio’s campaign and his plans to care for the city’s homeless population, which has risen to record levels under Bloomberg. Providing shelter beds can be lucrative for landlords — the city typically pays rents of more than $3,000 a month — and one attendee recalls that, prior to the event, Lapes was frank about his reasons for giving. “This is the guy who is going to win,” he recalls Lapes saying. “This is the guy to bet on.”

In February, after the Times reported that Lapes had exploited an obscure loophole in the city’s campaign-finance rules to give De Blasio twice the legal limit, the candidate returned nearly $15,000 in donations from the landlord and his wife. “I’ve just made the decision to return the money, and that’s all I have to say,” he told the Post. But the broader pattern of giving — which ramped up as Housing Solutions USA, formed only in 2011, was pressing forward with controversial multi-million-dollar city shelter contracts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx — has not previously been reported.

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The burden is on Amanda to push through last-minute projects

From Crains:

A derelict sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the world's largest indoor ice-skating complex in the Bronx and a 63-story Ferris wheel on Staten Island are among a crush of projects that developers are trying to get through the Department of City Planning before the pro-development Bloomberg administration comes to a close on Dec. 31, and its powerful chairwoman, Amanda Burden, steps down.

Adding to the pressure on the department, the mayor himself is looking to win approval on a number of his own legacy projects, including a massive rezoning of midtown east.

The reason for the frenzy is simple: The planning commission, along with the City Council, has the final say on the shape of all land-use projects. Without City Planning's approval now, dozens of projects will need to start from square one with a commission headed by the new mayor's appointees—seven of the 13 members—a prospect that will add great uncertainty, and potentially months or even years of work.

The projects now heaped at the department's downtown door at 22 Reade St. roughly fall into three categories: city-led developments, private projects and those being pursued by private developers on public property. For many, it almost feels like now or never.

In an effort to meet its titanic obligations, the department recently added four temporary planners at its Manhattan headquarters.

"Mayor Bloomberg has asked all city agencies to get as much done as they possibly can in the next 134 days, and the Department of City Planning is working hard to do just that," said a spokesman for the department.

Some developers are going so far as to throw together provisional plans for upcoming projects and then try to get preliminary approvals for these project outlines.

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Will the real Bill DeBlasio please stand up?

From The Daily Beast:

In 2004 de Blasio was a paid adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign. And in this year’s mayoral race, his rhetoric about “a tale of two cities”—a line he has used to critique growing income inequality—has echoed Edwards’s rhetoric from 2004 about the “two Americas.” Yet while serving on the City Council, he frequently found himself on the wrong side of progressives in his district (admittedly not hard in ultraliberal Park Slope) and was sometimes blasted for favoring developers and real-estate interests over community concerns about congestion and quality of life.

For example, he sided with a developer in opposing the designation of the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site—even as nearby residents said that the city was ill equipped to carry out the cleanup on its own. He pushed to allow luxury housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. And he was one of the primary backers of the controversial redevelopment of Atlantic Yards into a basketball arena for the Brooklyn Nets—a nearly decade-long fight that pitted local residents against powerful real-estate interests.

De Blasio’s most important maneuver has been to capitalize on liberal frustration with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“He said that it was necessary to stop the tide of gentrification, but everyone knows this was the most gentrifying thing to ever happen to Brooklyn,” says Lucy Koteen, a local political activist who backs current City Comptroller John Liu. “He is not wrong about the ‘tale of two cities.’ But look at his record. Did he help level the playing field, or is he on the side of developers who have gotten rich displacing people?”

From the NY Post:

The City Planning Commission rep appointed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — a critic of big developers — voted with the administration 93 percent of the time, records show.

One of those votes was to approve Extell’s West Side tower that includes a “poor door” separating subsidized tenants from those paying market rents.

A de Blasio spokesman said the rep actually fought “the poor door,” but Extell found a way around her objection.

De Blasio’s rep has voted in favor of 554 out of 595 projects since 2010.

Capital New York has a good wrap-up of his development stances in the past.

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Udalls Cove needs more protection

From Bayside Patch:

A Douglaston civic organization is calling on the city to purchase five parcels of Udalls Cove to protect it from possibly being developed.

The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee sent a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, calling on him to allocate funding for the acquisition of five parcels of the cove.

Walter Mugdan, the group’s president said he recently discovered that the parcels’ owner intended to sell the land.

Mugdan said the last time such a threat arose in 2002. Two years later, the mayor agreed to allocate funding to acquire a section of Udalls Cove for preservation purposes and to prevent 18 homes from being constructed at the site.

Bloomberg actually bought land to prevent development somewhere? Why is Douglaston so different from the rest of the city?

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Developer incentives don't provide enough affordable housing

From the NY Times:

For years, New York City has tried to create more affordable housing by encouraging developers to include apartments for low- and middle-income households in return for being allowed to construct bigger buildings.

But a new report by the office of City Councilman Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat and housing expert, says that that strategy is producing too few affordable units and that the city should require developers to build more of them.

The report, to be released on Friday by Mr. Lander and the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which represents nonprofit groups that promote affordable housing, found that the optional program known as inclusionary zoning had generated about 2,700 permanently affordable units since 2005, or less than 2 percent of all apartments developed in the city during the same period.

Under the program, the city allows developers of market-rate housing to build more units than would normally be allowed when neighborhoods are rezoned for new development, as long as they make 20 percent of the new homes affordable.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the real estate industry have favored the exchange of more density for affordable set-asides on a voluntary basis. But affordable housing advocates and some mayoral candidates argue that the time has come for mandatory programs to make a dent in the housing shortage for low-income New Yorkers.

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He's such a reformer...

From the Daily News:

The deep-pocketed real estate investors who own a landmark former stock exchange building in lower Manhattan lavished Gov. Cuomo with $76,000 in campaign donations just weeks before Cuomo approved a lucrative tax break for their property.

Three partners at Fisher Brothers, which owns the historic New York Curb Exchange at 86 Trinity Place, each cut $25,000 checks to Cuomo on Dec. 27. One exec kicked in an additional $1,000 on Jan. 11, and Cuomo okayed the tax breaks Jan. 30. Fisher plans a high-rise residential tower at the site.

The contributions from the Fisher Brothers execs are just the latest to emerge in the controversy over five Manhattan properties that were singled out for tax breaks in a January bill. The Daily News reported last week that one of the other beneficiaries, Extell Development Co., gave $100,000 to Cuomo days before he signed the bill.

The breaks mean $35 million in tax relief over 10 years for Extell’s planned One57 luxury apartment tower on W. 57th St.

Extell President Gary Barnett also donated $100,000 three weeks after the bill was signed to a state Democratic Party account that Cuomo was using to pay for ads pushing his agenda.

An anti-corruption commission created by Cuomo has subpoenaed the five companies.

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Do as he says, not as he does

From the Daily News:

A top development company donated $100,000 to Gov. Cuomo just days before he signed a bill that quietly showered the firm with lucrative tax breaks.

Two corporations tied to Extell Development each contributed $50,000 to Cuomo’s campaign, which recorded the checks on Jan. 28 — the same day the Assembly passed a housing bill that contained tax breaks for five developers, including Extell, records show.

Cuomo signed the legislation two days later.

The twin $50,000 donations were made by Elco Master LLC and 134 W 58 LLC. Each listed the same Louisville, Ky., address of Extell Financial Services, which is part of Extell Development. It was the first time either company contributed to Cuomo, state records show.

And less than three weeks after the bill became law, Extell President Gary Barnett donated $100,000 to a state Democratic Party account that Cuomo was tapping to finance ads pushing his agenda. Records dating to 1999 show it was the only time he gave to the state party.

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Brooklynites have brains

From NY1:

Decades of pollution left the Gowanus Canal toxic. The federal government designated it a superfund cleanup site.

Developer Lightstone Group believes its planned 700 unit residential buildings are environmentally friendly, and that some of the associated construction will actually help clean the water.

More than a dozen residents, though gathered on the bridge over the canal Thursday expressing their concern to mayoral candidate William Thompson.

"We're very concerned about what we see as a very wrongheaded, ill-conceived design," said Warren Cohen of Save Gowanus.

Many are worried the development will make flooding in their neighborhood worse during storms.

"It's safe for them," Cohen said. "They stay dry. We get wet, and unfortunately, we get wet with toxic water."

Yet when development happened on brownfields in LIC, and along Flushing and Newtown Creeks, no one said a thing.

Wake the hell up, Queens.

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Hypocrites, a bit?

Photo from The Forum

From the Queens Gazette:

More than 500 people filled outreach center Ohr Natan on Thursday, July 25 to fight for the facility to remain open. Members of the community, spiritual leaders and elected officials voiced their support for Ohr Natan, where thousands of people depend upon for their food distribution, classes, children’s programs, events, lectures, referrals, ESL classes and Judaic studies each year. Ohr Natan is being evicted and possibly taken over by a developer who plans to convert the center into an apartment building. In attendance were Congressmember Grace Meng, state Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, Assemblymember Michael Simanowitz, Councilmember Karen Koslowitz, borough president candidate Melinda Katz and Barbara Baruch representing City Comptroller John Liu. Proclamations were presented to Ohr Natan by Meng, Stavisky, Koslowitz and Liu. The theme of the event was “We are here together with Ohr Natan —No to development! No to Destruction!”

No to development, no to destruction?!?

When was the last preservation rally that this cast of characters showed up for? They usually are the ones proclaiming that a structure needs to be torn down in the name of progress.

Melinda Katz is the reason that they are being evicted in the first place because she told the LPC in 2006 that the site was not worthy of landmarking (at the congregation's urging).  The other dopey electeds have caused similar harm throughout the borough.  So why all of a sudden is preservation so important?  How deep are the pockets of this crowd?

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Borough President campaign contributions break down as suspected

From The Forum:

Vallone is the fundraising leader with $1,224,797 cash-on-hand followed by Katz with $882,458.

An analysis of the three candidates funding sources shows very definite patterns with both Vallone and Katz pulling substantial contributions from large and well-connected real estate and construction firms while Avella’s base could most easily be described as grass-roots with mostly smaller contributions from individuals and local businesses.

Contribution levels for both Vallone and Katz frequently topped $4,000 whereas by contrast, Avella had few, if any, contributions above $1,000.

Among Katz’ major contributors included Cordmeyer Development, Vornado Realty and Tully Construction. Vallone Jr. counted Ahern Construction, Tully Construction as well as numerous unions including firefighters and sanitation workers among his major backers.

Avella’s major funders included numerous retirees, civil servants and local businesses. He has little support from corporate real estate and/or law firms.

If you want a good laugh, check out the NY1 Queens Borough President debate from Thursday night.

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"Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it"

From DNA Info:

The building housing a long-time and prominent Rego Park synagogue is slated for demolition, raising fears that the congregation, which has more than 1,000 people, will have no place to go.

The worries came despite assurances from new landlord Rudolf Abramov of Trylon LLC that the displacement of Ohr Natan Synagogue would be temporary and the congregation will be allowed back once the new building is completed.

The news also comes after the congregation poured more than $2 million into a 4-year-long renovation of the historic former Art Deco Trylon Theatre.

The group's rabbi, Nahum Kaziev, said he fears that despite the developers' pledge, the congregation may not be allowed to return.

Kaziev also said the displacement during the construction period would last a couple of years.

"Where are we going to be in the meantime? On the street?," said Kaziev. “It’s unbelievable, it’s a shame."

The 25,000-square-foot property, located on a triangle-shaped lot between Queens Boulevard, 99th Street and 66th Avenue, was sold in December 2012, for $9 million, according to Eugene Kim from Massey Knakal, a real estate company, which facilitated the sale.

It was sold in 2012? I found a blog post about it, but no press release. Interesting that all media outlets would fail to pick up this February news story about such a controversial property. Who exactly did Massey Knakal send it out to...or did they "forget" to send it out?

Anyway, I don't feel sorry for the congregation at all. They could have had a permanent home. But they instead chose to lobby Melinda Katz for funding to destroy historical aspects of it as well as to deny landmark status for the building. Why couldn't preservation be part of the plan? Because they just HAD TO destroy the historic mosaics in front of the place and cinderblock up the entrance. So they are about to get exactly what's coming to them.

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Brownfield housing still causing problems

From the Queens Chronicle:

A housing and hotel complex project off the Long Island Expressway in Fresh Meadows has neighbors fuming over lack of maintenance, shoddy workmanship and fear of future flooding.

The project’s address is 183-15 Horace Harding Expressway, but the 18 two-family houses that were completed over a year ago are located on adjacent 183rd Street and Booth Memorial Drive, residential streets with well-maintained homes.

Neighbors complain that there is no maintenance of the site, which features a large hole in the middle where the hotels are to be constructed. It was dug so that the project could be grandfathered in prior to a downzoning of the area.

Nearby residents say the hole attracts raccoons and other animals, while nearby barrels are filled with rainwater that they fear are breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The construction fences on the Horace Harding and Booth Memorial sides are flimsy and the one in the rear can be easily moved. Vandals have already stolen decorative metal balls atop railings on the houses.

Christine Haider, first vice chairwoman of Community Board 11 and president of the nearby Harding Heights Civic Association, says she’s “extremely concerned” about how the development is being built. “There are so many problems, it’s very frustrating,” Haider said. “The developer can amend plans until construction is finished.”

The most troublesome issue to neighbors is the driveways, which were designed too steep for the underground garages. The Department of Buildings did not approve it so the owners, Century Construction Group Corp., headed by brothers Chris and George Xu, raised the grade of the driveways, which eliminated the garages.

“They repitched it, eliminating the garage, so there’s no room for two cars as planned,” Haider said. “We fear that they will try to put a third family in the basement since they added a window where the garage door was to go.”

Oh come now, when have you ever heard of a developer doing that?...

It seems like just yesterday that this was a brownfield.

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Ok, Queens. Can we top this one?

From CBS 2:

One look at the abandoned house in Riverdale and you know exactly why the neighbors are so upset. The shingles have fallen off. You can see holes in the roof. A tree is actually growing out of the house. And garbage and machinery is strewn all over the yard.

Public records show the house was purchased in 2006 for more than $3 million. The property is owned by a real estate company called 620 Blackstone, LLC, run by Josh Neustein.

Neustein owns several rental properties in the area and lives only a few miles away from this home, also in the fancy Riverdale section of the Bronx.

A woman inside the home told Leitner she was at the wrong address, but neighbors and public records confirmed the residence owned by Neustein.

He was named to the city’s worst landlord list in 2012 by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, with 753 open hazardous violations on five buildings.

What's with the zoning here?

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The history of Tommy Huang

From The Real Deal:

Huang left his native Taiwan in 1974 at age 20 and settled in Flushing, Queens. A few years later, he married Alice Liu, heiress to Taiwan’s Haw Di-I Foods and Bull Head Barbecue Sauce fortunes and cousin to City Comptroller John Liu, a Democrat who is running for mayor.

While studying business at Queens College, Huang saw opportunity in Flushing’s many vacant properties and decided to go into the real estate business.

“I could not believe it,’’ Huang told the New York Times in 1997 of the empty land he saw around him. “How come nobody wants to buy it?’’

With the help of his wealthy father-in-law, Huang built seven high-rises and hundreds of houses. By the late 1980s, he had been credited with helping to revive downtown Flushing with projects such as the Golden Shopping Mall and Main Street Tower, a nine-story office building. In 1986, Huang paid $3.4 million for the dilapidated RKO Keith’s movie theater on Northern Boulevard in Flushing. Huang closed the landmark and began work on the site, with plans to develop it into a major shopping center.

Soon, Huang caught the eye of the Democratic political machine, which at the time was led by then-Queens Borough President Donald Manes. Working with Manes to encourage business development, Huang solidified his ties with the Queens political establishment, which helped him evolve into one of the most powerful real estate developers in the borough.

“They were grooming Tommy to be the fair-haired boy,” said Jerry Rotondi, a member of the Committee to Save the RKO Keith’s and a long-time critic of Huang.

“He was the symbol of the revitalization,” State Senator Leonard Stavisky told the New York Times in 1997. “But it was wrong to entrust so much of it to Tommy Huang.’’

It’s been suggested that Huang’s political ties with the city comptroller and others could partially explain the city’s inaction.

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Goodbye, gold coast

From the NY Times:

Inside the mansion it looked as if all parties — and anything else that had taken place in the mansion since the Jazz Age — were most certainly over. Movers had carted away just about everything from the 87-room, Elizabethan-Tudor-style mansion, which was designed by John Torrey Windrim and completed in 1920 for Nicholas F. Brady, an industrialist who was the head of numerous utility companies.

It was named Inisfada — Gaelic for Long Island — and it was one of the grandest of the Gold Coast mansions on Long Island’s North Shore, with 37 fancifully decorated chimneys, stately slate roofs and a facade decorated with scenes from fairy tales. It served as the summer residence for Mr. Brady and his wife, Genevieve, who never had children. After her husband’s death, she donated the home in 1937 to the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, the local branch of the Jesuits, which turned it into a seminary and later the Saint Ignatius Retreat House.

But now, local civic groups fear that the building faces demolition. Inisfada and its 33 overgrown acres were listed for sale last year for $49 million. The Jesuits are on the verge of closing a deal with a developer from Hong Kong who some preservationists fear will knock down the building as part of a plan to create a gated community of luxury homes, said Richard Bentley, president of the Council of Greater Manhasset Civic Associations, which is mounting a grass-roots campaign to save the mansion.

It is unclear what the developer intends to do, since neither the Jesuits nor the buyers have addressed the issue publicly, but Mr. Bentley said he was under the impression that the developer’s plans did not include keeping the structure, because “They could avoid all this opposition and bad press by simply saying they’re preserving it.”

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Developer caught violating stop work order, fined

Before

After

From PaulGraziano.com:

Several weeks ago, a construction fence went up around 156-10 32nd Avenue, a quiet block in Broadway-Flushing across the street from Bowne Park.  The house's new owner, Jian Wen Zhu, had recently applied for an alteration permit known as an "ALT 1" which specifically states that over 50% of the building must be retained, including the basement or cellar. In other words, an alteration permit means just that: an alteration to an existing building, not a new building.

Two days later, the building was more than 50% demolished; within another two days, almost the entire building had been removed, except for two exterior wall stubs.

Paul Graziano, candidate for the 19th Council District, had contacted the local homeowner association as well as State Senator Tony Avella, and wrote a "Zoning Challenge" to the Department of Buildings, as it was clear that the architect on record, Ling Li, had self-certified a project that violated the R1-2A zoning - New York City's most restrictive - which covers much of Broadway-Flushing.

After a series of 311 calls were made and official complaints were lodged by residents of the area, the Buildings Department sent an inspector, who stated that 'No violation warranted for complaint at time of inspection; site is fenced, gated and secure with permits posted and current for ALT 1 - no workers on site.' 

"This was an outrage," Graziano stated, "as the complaint that was filed with 311 called for a Stop Work Order, as the demolition for the house far exceeded what an ALT 1 permit allows and the permit itself should not have been granted as the floor area was over what is allowed under the R1-2A zone. The 311 operator had listed that the complaint was concerned with safety, and the Buildings inspector responded to that instead of what they were supposed to."

One week later, the Department of Buildings finally responded to the correct complaint, after much pressure from Senator Avella, Graziano and local residents. On Thursday, July 18th, a Full Stop Work Order was served to the owner for demolition contrary to approved plans. However, the contractors at the site continued to work on Friday, July 19th and Monday, July 22nd.

On Monday morning, Graziano and a resident involved with the homeowners association confronted the foreman of the construction crew - which numbered at least a dozen - and engaged him in a heated exchange which lasted for more than 10 minutes. The foreman stated that he was allowed to work and "do maintenance" to the property, and that they hadn't done anything wrong. When pressed as to why there was a Stop Work Order and they were still working, he stated that "the house had some extra rot in it so we had to take down more of it than we thought." He followed this statement with a discussion about how this was America and it was the owner's right to build what he wanted.

That afternoon, again pressed by Senator Avella, Graziano and the homeowners association, the property was inspected by the Buildings Department a third time. A violation of the Stop Work Order was issued for "failure to obey stop work order" and a $5,000 civil fine was levied.

Now, the owner must apply for full demolition and new building permits as well as file new plans, which must be approved by the Department of Buildings.

"I'm glad the Department of Buildings finally did what they were supposed to do," said Graziano, "but it shouldn't have taken so long. More importantly, this house, along with all of the other teardowns that have occurred in the last decade, would have never happened if Broadway-Flushing had become a New York City landmark historic district as more than 85% of the residents have supported. The homeowners association and residents of this area have spent significant time, money and effort to protect their century-old neighborhood from speculative developers."

All of Broadway-Flushing was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 and was downzoned in 2009 with the most restrictive "anti-McMansion" zoning in New York City (R1-2A and R2A), both of which were authored and designed by Graziano.

"Last week's victory against the developer who tried to break the restrictive covenants and split a corner property is wonderful and the Stop Work Order is welcome," Graziano stated, "but if Broadway-Flushing had been landmarked almost a decade ago as it deserves, neither of these - nor other - bad development situations would have happened. The house at 156-10 32nd Avenue was a beautiful house and there was absolutely no reason to tear it down in the first place. Should I be lucky enough to be elected by the people of the 19th Council District in November, landmarking Broadway-Flushing and our other historic neighborhoods in the 19th Council District will be one of my absolute top priorities to make sure this doesn't ever happen again."

Stop Work Order / Civil Penalty for 156-10 32nd Avenue can be viewed here:

http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/OverviewForComplaintServlet?requestid=5&vlcompdetlkey=0001648878

http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/OverviewForComplaintServlet?requestid=5&vlcompdetlkey=0001651663

http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/ComplaintsByAddressServlet?requestid=7&allbin=4109856&fillerdata=A

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Trylon Theater & Tower Diner block advertised as hi-rise development site

Trylon Portfolio

A special thank you to former City Council Member and current Queens Machine-backed Queens Borough Presidential candidate Melinda Katz for making sure the LPC rejected the landmarking application.

Quote: In an interview with the Daily News, Katz explained that she was not disappointed in Tierney's decision, and thanked him for taking a "very careful look" at the Trylon issue. She added that the Trylon had been modified too much from its original look, with the theater's interior and marquee having been redone in 1984 and 1994, respectively. "I never thought that this was a building suitable for landmarking," Katz said. "I guess I'm just happy that he [Tierney] made a decision, and now we move on.

Actually, the facade of the building was what activists sought for landmarking, and that's the only part of a building the LPC can designate, unless it's open to the public, which this wasn't. As for the marquee, it's very unlikely that it would not be replaced over time. It hasn't stopped countless other landmark designations of theaters. The facade was 100% intact. Melinda knows this. She'd rather have development on Queens Blvd than preservation. Enjoy much more of this type of behavior should she enter Borough Hall and make the entire borough the Katz litter box.

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Part of Evergreen Cemetery may be developed

From the Daily News:

Dozens of trees, some more than a century old, were cut down in the Evergreens Cemetery, a case of arborcide that leaves only an unsightly bald patch on the rolling hills of the celebrated boneyard.

One worker, who asked not to be identified, estimated close to 70 stately maples, elms, sassafras and oaks were slaughtered in the past two months.

“This is murder,” said the worker. “These trees withstood all the wind and the rain from Hurricane Sandy, and they remained undamaged, and now they're cutting them down?”

The cemetery worker said some people speculated the land - located on the edge of the cemetery near Highland Blvd. not far from the Broadway Junction subway station — would be used for commercial development.

Grassi didn’t deny it, but said such plans are up in the air.

“We haven't made a final decision yet,” he said. “But we are hoping to replant trees over there.”

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